‘Blood on my Water’: Ruchir Joshi

Abstract

In our consideration of the contemporary Indian novel in English, we have thus far based our readings on two basic propositions: that the material environment of unevenly developed postcolonial India forms a necessary horizon for these artistic registers; and that these realities find themselves embedded in both the form and content of the novels. If uneven historical development (shaped by colonialism and neo- or postcolonialism) is registered in the novel’s formal traffic with the various ‘archaic’ and local cultural expressions that surround it, the incessant presence of the relationship between land, air, water and the various non-humans and humans who inhabit these spaces as thematic underpinning confirms the importance of environment to the core of that body of writing that is most easily identified with the global boom in South Asian literature.